Distanced Together Under the Dark Rift

The Dark Rift is dust in the disk of our Milky Way where stars form.

EarthSky photo by Chuck Reinhart.

 

   

Behind the galaxy, there was a flute:

sound was making love to sound;

time was making sound.


Summer made a fire in us:

the cosmos waited for a sign;

the soul was waiting for the mind.

—the personal essence of the Brenda Hillman poem,

"Geminid Showers and Health Care Reform"

21st Century Breakdown

     

Dread of the night,

not the dark but the dreams,

Fear your touch isn't real.

Fear of the cough

in the market unmasked,

Dread of what follows.


Dread of the vote

flawed beyond count,

Fear of what follows.


Fear of the gunfire

deep in the hollow,

Dread of what follows.


Dread of being alone

for the rest of my days,

Fear I won’t.


Fear I will never see you again,

never again feel your touch,

Dread I will.

Dried Flowers

     

I have arranged my losses poorly

into a spray of pain, derivative

of Lucille Clifton's Bouquet;

parents, wife, daughter, friends,

gathered from what bloomed within my reach.


A thorn still broke off in my thumb.

Leaves crumbled in my clumsy hands.

The Visitor

How strange it all looks from the moon,

life being mostly sky, mostly space,

when you slipped out of the past,

disrupting my days deep in the forest,

primitive and undefiled, content in my ways,

undone by satellite facial recognition,

you riding off with your young warrior

leaving me to conjure spells

with my feathers and bones,

attempting to live to scale

when the distances are planetary.

Megalith

Summer solstice sunrise inside Stonehenge, mysticrealms.org photo

   

Would the stones not fall?

You jump, I jump, she had said,

Wild to be ruins.

Verdancy

   

It's nature's way

to overgrow a vacancy,

but not today,


A reaching out

for voids, a filling in,

but not today,


Today the empty places

pull you down,

the ache of retrospect


Tails you in this long

and perfect afternoon—

the extravagance of June


Almost too much

to bear without those few

most dear—cruel memory.


And yet, and yet,

there is a beauty

to your emptiness,


Anguish lets you know

you are alive; time to call

on instinct to survive,


And off you go

into the balanced world

to err again.

Infinitives in Late Light

     

Then it's into the woods

in the cooling dusk,

to let the night close over me

in a dome of candlelight,

to hear the train in the valley

calling for rain,

to hear the flying squirrels

scuttering over the siding,

deer snuffing and stamping

somewhere beyond the cabin porch,


To read what i read there,

making my notes,

old wisdom from those

used to being alone,

alone in the dark,

daring to face their own lives,

daring to feel what they felt,

to think what they thought,

writing it down,

shaking off sadness with a shudder,


"Sorrow is a river

older than desire,"

that sort of thing,

then to blow out the candles,

one at a time,

smoke curling up into the rafters,

the dark in its orderly fashion

falling across the hills

as I find my way

back to the house.


I walk alone.

My head is full.

Irises

Iris in the dark

Opened at the stable door.

Always you at night. 

Between Storms

Oklahoma, 2016. Dark Skies photo.

     

Bullfrogs and fireflies,

The power knocked out again,

A pulse between storms,

Lightning far off without sound,

Sleepless and heartsick with loss.

Bicycle Tanka

   

Riding the paved road,

Red barns under thunderheads,

The wind in your mouth,

Guernseys with Natalie eyes

Canter beside your fast shade.

—with a reference to Natalie Wood

June in Upper Turkeyfoot

     

Evening along the paved road

Retired farmers wave

From cooling sunset porches

You Want It Darker

you want it darker

you want Leonard

singing it near death

ragged and deep

you want voices

in empty cathedrals

altos and basses

prophets and mystics

oboes and cellos

storms and eclipses

you want a tattooed muse

phases of the moon

collarbone to collarbone

quoting Yeats you want

another chance

to be eighteen

and at the end

you want no end to want

That to Which I Have Become Accustomed

Minneapolis, photo by Salwan Georges/The Washigton Post

Behind the wooded hill

a chainsaw revs,

somewhere in the township

a distant barking dog,

speckled vocal starlings

in blighted yellow crowns

rise in failing light,

wings and blind instinct,

behind the wooded hill

no one will come.


Best we do not know

each other well,

love grows easily

and death and death,

daughter, mother, wife,

gunfire in the vales,

the only joys I know

are small, unmasked

behind the wooded hill

and waiting still.

Kelly's Dogwood

I've strung new lights

in your tree on the hill

so I can see you there

where I scattered your ashes

at night solar-powered


Sometimes together

we ease the red sun

behind Laurel Ridge

as if we could guide

the things that should be


It's always sudden

when your lights come on.